Tuesday Tea: Share a favorite food-centric book.
Novel, memoir, cookbook... anything yummy you want to share
Hello, friends!
Food in fiction is such a powerful way to give us insight into characters and their culture. I mean, Bonjour, Proust’s madeleine, and who can forget the meaning layered in the Count’s commitment to making a pot of bouillabaisse in A Gentleman in Moscow. There’s the Turkish delight in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Paddington’s Marmalade sandwiches, the seed cake in Jane Eyre, and every exotic morsel in Babette’s Feast.
As I think most of you know — because I cannot stop writing about it — we’re going to Saint-Malo, France (and Paris and Berlin) to celebrate my birthday next month. We have many fun plans, but the one I’m most excited about is a picnic by the sea with a baguette and butter from Maison Bordier. I recently informed Dave that we must also have strawberries and chocolate, ‘so it’s like when they go to France in The Historian.’
The relevant quote from Elizabeth Kostova’s book:
At farms along the road, we stopped to buy picnics better than any restaurant could have made for us: boxes of new strawberries that gave off a red glow in the sun and seemed to need no washing; cylinders of goat cheese weighty as barbells and encrusted with a rough gray mold, as if they’d been rolled across a cellar floor. My father drank dark red wine, unlabeled and costing only centimes, which he recorked after each meal, carrying with it a small glass wrapped carefully in a napkin. For dessert we ravaged whole loaves of newly baked bread from the last town, inserting squares of dark chocolate into them. My stomach ached with pleasure and my father said ruefully that he’d have to diet again when we returned to our ordinary lives.
There is so much food in The Historian (and in another of her books, The Shadow Land, set in Bulgaria). Other novels that I love (love love) with food as a character include:
Still Life by Sarah Winman (Italy)
A Pure Heart by Rajia Hassib (Egypt)
Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi (Nigeria)
Listen Slowly by Thanhha Lai (Vietnam)
Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li (American Chinese restaurant)
Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber (American Lebanese restaurant)
The Dishwasher by Stéphane Larue, Pablo Strauss (translator) (Montreal restaurant)
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, Ginny Tapley Takemori (translator) (Japan)
The Great Passage by Shion Miura, Juliet Winters Carpenter (translator) (Japan)
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, Carol and Thomas Christenen (translators) (Mexico)
Popular Music from Vittula by Mikael Niemi, Laurie Thompson (translator) (Sweden)
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson (Jamaica)
Cinnamon and Gunpowder by Eli Brown (Pirate tale at sea)
City of Thieves by David Benioff (Russia)
Take-Out: And Other Tales of Culinary Crime by Rob Hart (around the world)
The Last Cruise by Kate Christensen (Luxury cruise ship at sea)
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Magical circus)
For cookbooks that read like travelogue/memoir, here are 12 Inspiring Cookbooks That Will Transport You Around the World — and here’s the archive of recipes inspired by our book recommendations.
You've mentioned many of my favorites, but I would also include the Provence memoirs by Peter Mayle and the Tuscany memoirs by Frances Mayes, and definitely Stanley Tucci's Taste: My Life Through Food!
If you are up for a little magical realism in your fiction, I recently read and loved Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle. A young man discovers he can summon ghosts through food memories. He becomes a chef to help loved ones find closure from their grief by giving them a last moment with the person who died. There is also a love story involved as well. The author is a big foodie and her food writing is fantastic. We recently had her on our podcast. You can listen here if interested.
https://ThePerksofBeingaBookLover.podbean.com/e/s14ep276-aftertaste-with-guest-daria-lavelle-women-in-stem-book-recommendations-4126/